World Password Day falls on May the 4th this year, or “May the 4th Be With You!” for those who recognize this date as the annual celebration of Star Wars Day. For the 2023 observance of the latter, fans around the world (including myself) will rejoice as Carrie Fisher (aka “Princess Leia”) is honored with a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Today, Fireblocks is launching our new Fireblocks Compliance Solutions Suite to streamline and simplify how our customers meet digital asset regulatory requirements, and stay ahead of industry threats. The new suite enables Fireblocks customers to easily integrate transaction monitoring, wallet screening, and Travel Rule compliance into their existing transaction and compliance workflows and approvals.
The most common route for malware infections remains social engineering in its various forms: phishing, vishing, etc. Such approaches take advantage of users’ deliberately cultivated willingness to trust communications they receive and to follow the instructions and links such malicious communications carry.
Walmart’s rise to become the brand most likely to be impersonated in Q1 of this year is a real problem. If you’ve been paying attention to brand impersonation in phishing attacks, you know the premise is to use a brand that a large number of potential victims do business with as a means of both establishing credibility. For many quarters, we continually saw Microsoft and/or Microsoft 365 as the brand of choice due to its wide use.
March saw a huge jump in ransomware compared to January and February, signifying that organizations should expect to see a lot more of these attacks this year. With security solutions getting good at spotting and stopping malware on endpoints and servers, you’d think that ransomware attacks would be dwindling. But, according to the NCC Group’s Cyber Threat Report for March 2023, it feels a lot more like 2023 is going to be a repeat of 2022, but at significantly higher attack levels.
The malwareless and seemingly benign nature of business email compromise emails, mixed with impersonation techniques, are difficult to spot as being malicious, making them even more dangerous. I’ve covered both the threat of business email compromise and response-based email attacks before. How can I not? They are prominent techniques used by phishing scammers everywhere. But it’s the reported combination of the two by Phish Labs that has me concerned.
A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Oh, here we are again. How? They never seem to learn…
Many major stories about cyberattacks or data breaches have one weak link in common: passwords. Oftentimes, the simple alphanumeric password that acts as gatekeeper to our personal phones and email accounts is the same one that protects enterprise businesses’ servers. And passwords are only as strong as we make them. Unfortunately, though, most employees—76 percent of Americans, according to research we conducted in 2022—never change their passwords, or only do so when forced to.
